Moborate

As if almost on cue to khabardrama's long-delayed review of Arif Nizami's Pakistan Today (see previous post ), comes news from chacha Majid Nizami 's The Nation of large-scale layoffs at the paper there (no, we don't think there's any connection). More than 30 staffers have been summarily dismissed today without any advance warning from the Lahore office alone and several from Islamabad as well. The Peshawar and Karachi bureaus fear that the axe will next fall on them. Economic difficulties are being cited as the only reason. It's not entirely clear yet whether the personnel sacked were the same ones who had recently received long-delayed raises or whether these layoffs had anything to do with the very recent departure of editor Shireen Mazari . It should be kept in mind that Majid Nizami can be a vengeful proprietor. We heard about a peon who was recently summarily sacked after more than 20 years of service, simply because the management suspected that his l...

First of all an apology and an excuse. I have been meaning to write about Arif Nizami 's long-awaited Pakistan Today ever since it hit the newstands but have found myself contracting a severe case of writer's block every time I sat down to do just that. Front page, Berliner-style The reason is simple. Maybe it's just me, but I need to either love something passionately to feel motivated enough to gush about it in print or to feel it's so bad that I can't wait to tear it to pieces. In the present case, I felt no such overpowering emotion. No adulation or loathing or anything so strong. Just a vague grey reaction. Competent, I thought. Pretty decent. Promising. Not too bad really. A solid, worthy venture. But nothing exciting. Or too awful. The paper certainly looks different though. Mainly because it doesn't look like your average broadsheet Pakistani daily due to its ' Berliner ' (not tabloid, they insist) format. Now I do realise that most upmarket...